A paved surface designed for high speed travel, such as a highway or racetrack, may incorporate banked curves in which the roadway slopes downward from the outside edge of the curve toward the inside edge, thereby directing the normal force on vehicles traveling through the curve inward, providing additional centripetal force and reducing the importance of friction between their wheels and the surface to keep said vehicles on course through the curve. Such a banked curve may reflect a constant radius from a constant center point, and a constant downslope.
In order to avoid sudden changes in lateral acceleration between banked curves and level surfaces (where there is no lateral acceleration), the paved surface may incorporate transition curves, which provide a smooth transition from level highway to banked curve and back again. A paving or texturing machine may incorporate hydraulic actuators to raise or lower the superstructure of the machine relative to the surface. However, the degree of superelevation necessary for a banked curve or a transition curve (i.e., the difference in height between the outside and inside edges of the curve) may exceed the capacity of hydraulic actuators to vertically articulate the machine. In addition, while a portion of a paved surface incorporating a banked curve may require a constant downslope, a transition curve seamlessly connecting a substantially flat (i.e., zero slope) surface with a downsloping banked curve may require a downslope that changes from point to point along the transverse axis of the curve, or a downslope that changes along the transverse axis of the paved surface. In the latter case, raising or lowering the rigid, linear transverse frame of the finishing machine via hydraulic actuators is not a viable solution. The use of power transition adjusters is known in the art to bend the rigid frame of the paving or finishing machine; e.g., to raise the centerpoint of the machine so that the paved surface can be crowned. However, such a configuration also fails to solve the problem of texturing a transition curve of continually or nonlinearly changing downslope or transverse curve. It may therefore be desirable to provide an efficient means of finishing or texturing a continuous paved surface including one or more transition curves. It may further be desirable to provide a single efficient means of finishing or texturing a continuous paved surface including both transition curves and more gradually sloped surfaces.